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Latest from Rapid Web

Country information is used so frequently in modern web development. This is especially true in customer relationship managements systems and e-commerce websites. Since we do a lot of e-commerce and CRM development here at Rapid Web, we developed an open source library to easily retrieve country information. The rest of this post will detail how you can use this library, PHP Countries, and what it is capable of.
Installation
To install PHP C...

If you've ever needed to display opening times for a business on their website you'll probably have encountered the edge case of differing opening times on UK Bank Holidays. The UK government provides information regarding all UK Bank Holidays, and we've written a small open-source PHP library to take advantage of this. Installation You can install the PHP UK Bank Holidays package using Composer. If you've never used Composer before, you can fi...

At the beginning of last year, I posted about our open source contributions from 2015. Most of these projects focused on frontend web development. This time around, the majority of our new open sourced projects are backend code and libraries. They also include a small selection of 'Simple' libraries, designed to wrap around complex functionality and abstract it. Here's a summary of our main open source projects and contributions from 2016 &amp...

To help developers easily implement the basics of Stripe into their website and quickly accept payments, we created the open source PHP library SimpleStripe. SimpleStripe SimpleStripe is a package that allows you to really quickly setup a payment form on a website and charge customers. As you probably guessed by its creative name, it makes use of the Stripe payments system. Although Stripe itself is already a very developer friendly ...

In 2015, Rapid Web made a commitment to increase their contributions to the open source community. We therefore started several open source projects. This post will go over some of the most interesting open source contributions we made last year. Direct Share Buttons Including large amounts of external JavaScript and 3rd party code for all the various social media sites can be a pain. They can slow down the loading and rendering of your webpage...

Google Contacts PHP library We're happy to announce that we have recently open sourced a Google Contacts API PHP client library. This library is MIT licensed (so anyone can use it) and available on our GitHub account. For more information about Rapid Web's open source efforts, please visit our Rapid Web open source mini-site. About This Google Contacts API library is designed for use in PHP frameworks and general PHP web applications. It use...

In recent years, open source software has become more frequently used by businesses and individuals alike. Why is this, and what makes open source solutions so increasingly popular? Below I list five reasons why open source software can be good for your business.
Security
The security of software used in your business is very important. It is used to protect, process and store your company's intellectual property. By its nature open source softwa...

I previously posted on how Nokia open-sourced the Symbian mobile operating system and the advantages this will bring to mobile web developers. Nokia has now released their first mobile device based on the open-source version of Symbian, the Nokia N8 phone.
It is the first version of the software since the Symbian foundation announced that it had made its code open source in February. The Foundation - which includes Nokia, Motorola and Samsung am...

WordPress, the super popular open-source content management and blogging software has recently gone into beta. Version 3 of WordPress looks to bring many new features to the system including a revamped administration system and the ability to deploy a network of WordPress powered blogs simultaneously on the same domain in either seperate directories or subdomains. WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 also comes with a new default blog them called Twenty Ten whi...

WordPress, possibly the most popular blogging software out there, is set to heavily open source the design of its user interface this year. WordPress is an open source blogging solution written in PHP and powered by a MySQL database backend. Code wise, it is entirely open source and licensed in entirety under the GNU General Public License (version 2), and as of typing this, it is used by over 200 million websites worldwide. Design in WordP...

In a move that should help with mobile web design and development for Nokia's mobile devices, the Symbian operating system which powers these devices has been made open source. Nokia is releasing their Symbian operating system, which includes the Symbian web browser, under an open source license. Symbian is the most popular smartphone operating system, and its total code base is valued at "billions of dollars". The open sourcing of Symbian hopes...

As a user of desktop Linux distributions, both at work and at home, I'm often trying to promote the use of Linux-based systems such as Ubuntu. Systems such as Linux to often seen to be only for the most geeky or technical minded of people, whilst Windows or Mac are heavily promoted as being used for everyday, family orientated purposes. This can be as complex as managing home finances and budgets with a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft ...